East Village Update: Last Call – Classic Dive Bar Closing Sunday

Attention!! This is your final opportunity to visit the legendary Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Mark’s Place, between First and Second Avenue. Saturday night will be the final night of service and after that, locks will be changed immediately. A new unnamed bar will be moving in.

Holiday was opened by Stefan Lutak in 1965 and quickly became a spot for poets and intellectuals such as W.H. Auden, Leon Trotsky, and Allen Ginsberg. Even Madonna reportedly hung out here before she became big.

In 2006, Caroline Dworin wrote a beautiful piece on the Holiday for the New York Times saying: “There is great poignancy to the case of the New York dive bar. In such an ever-shifting metropolis, whose streets, like rivers, are never the same streets twice, whose heights rise ever upward into taller, better, sleeker plains of steel, those small and stagnant pools may be the only place left where a man can see his reflection.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/nyregion/thecity/31dive.html

If you have some time and you’re in Lower Manhattan, you should go check out Holiday.